Re: PHP+gettext (was Re: My stab at the templates)

[Shawn T Amundson <amundson eventloop com>]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2001 at 01:36:36PM +0100, Paul Cooper wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 19, 2001 at 08:07:56AM +0100, Shawn T Amundson wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 19, 2001 at 08:09:00AM +0200, Christian Rose wrote:
> [snip]
> > Fixing typos or changing wording in english then messes up everyone
> > else, and since that's a common thing for a website of any size, the
> > problem is substantial.  It simply isn't realistic.
> 
> I had a quick read through the fabric manual - would it your suggestion to
> have templates for each language in a direactory structure? e.g.
> 
> templates/en/homepage.ftl
> .
> .
> templates/de/homepage.ftl
> .
> .

Something like that, yes.

> 
> It seems read fabric is *similar* to PHPLIB or PEAR templates to push data
> into templates. An alternative approach is Velocity
> http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/ which uses a pull model to achieve MVC
> separation.

I'll have to read on PHPLIB and PEAR templates to tell you for sure how
close they are; perhaps one of these are what some of the multilingual PHP
sites use?

Velocity is really very cool.  The design philosophy is actually extremely
similar to that when we had when designing Fabric.  The primary difference
is that Velocity still allows a lot of logic in the templates, and Fabric
allows none at all.  Fabric is also more than just a templating system.

> 
> However I seem to remember more people suggesting PHP than other options,
> so I did a really brain dead check,
> 
> [pgc hankey mail]$ grep php gnome-web | wc -l
>      90
> [pgc hankey mail]$ grep java gnome-web | wc -l
>      22
> [pgc hankey mail]$ grep perl gnome-web | wc -l
>      46
> [pgc hankey mail]$ grep python gnome-web | wc -l
>       3

Heh.  If 161 people were actually actively developing the site, it
would be finished already. ;-)

> 
> Let the flames begin ;-) But more seriously - what are our hardware
> constraints? Will we be able to support apache + tomcat + fabric or
> apache + PHP + PHP templates?
> 

I think the machines in place will support either method quite well.  My
experience has been that once you start doing highly dynamic sites, SQL
queries slow you down way more than your front-end templating system.

The thing to consider is that the more complex the templating system, 
the harder it will be to get content maintainers to work on the site.  
So, it's not just how many coders are involved, but also the people 
editting the pages on a weekly basis and those translating those changes.  

-Shawn

--
Shawn T. Amundson                       amundson eventloop com	
Research and Development                http://www.eventloop.com/
EventLoop, Inc.                         (651) 999-0130

"The assumption that the universe looks the same in every
 direction is clearly not true in reality." - Stephen Hawking